


Precious things

by ash_carpenter



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-27
Updated: 2014-04-27
Packaged: 2018-01-21 00:10:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1530821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ash_carpenter/pseuds/ash_carpenter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remix of 2ndA's wonderful drabble <a href="http://2ndary-author.livejournal.com/21071.html">'every secret thing, good or evil'</a>. Although I'm pretty sure she achieved more in her 100 words than I've done in over 1,000.</p>
<p>Some things are too powerful to destroy, but too dangerous to leave out in the open. So John locks them away, these precious things. </p>
<p>Or: you never let the evil bastards realize that you have something you'll do anything to keep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Precious things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [2ndA](https://archiveofourown.org/users/2ndA/gifts).
  * Inspired by ['every secret thing, good or evil'](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/47030) by 2ndA. 



** Precious things **

 

John wasn’t born to hunting, but there was one thing he knew instinctively that apparently his wife had not.

_– the leader of the Viet Cong squad grinned ferally as he tried to shield his wounded friend. Taunted in a language he couldn’t understand, he cried out with grief and fear and rage as Glynn’s head exploded all over him. The rest of his unit appeared out of nowhere and later on he couldn’t tell whether it was pieces of his friends or his enemies that he was picking out of his hair –_

However he came by his raw, instinctual understanding, the thing he knew was this: you never let the evil bastards realize that you have something precious. Something you’ll do anything to keep safe.

Although John was never privy to the full story, that had been Mary’s downfall. John himself had killed her, because she’d been prepared to offer anything to that yellow-eyed son of a bitch to save the man she loved.

But John knew better than that. He didn’t learn about curse boxes until Bobby Singer made him his first in 1989, but he was all too well-versed in locking things up tight and safe, guarding them against harm. His heart was a chamber of secrets, warded against everything except tequila and long, lonely nights.

~<O>~

_– Dean, I’m scared_

_it’s okay, Sammy, I promise. Nothin’ can hurt us, ‘cause Dad’s here –_

The night that John destroyed a powerful talisman snatched from around the slashed throat of an ancient witch, he caused an earthquake that killed three people and a storm that raged for days. Sammy was only six then, crying in terror as thunder rolled and boomed, flash-lightning snapping across the sky bright enough to sear the retinas. The kid couldn’t sleep at all unless Dean soothed him into it with reassurances and a steady hand rubbing circles over his back. John understood then that some things were too integral to the balance of the universe for him to break them or mess with their timeless strength.

So he found a low rent storage unit in a place no-one would think to look, had Bobby teach him how to make it as impenetrable as possible, and slowly filled it with the most dangerous treasures that crossed his path.

Over the years, John accumulated many things that needed to be carefully, reverently placed in that unit, locked up tight against the terror and destruction that they could unleash. Some were doubly perilous not only for their inherent power, but for what ruthless and evil people would pay to own them – or to know the secrets behind them. Many, many things, John wished that he could simply destroy. A few, he knew that he _should_ destroy, but just couldn’t bring himself to do it. Even though the very fact of their existence could obliterate his whole world.

Artfully disguised between all the tools and dirt and crap that one might expect to find in such a place were charms and idols and ancient spells, weapons and cursed objects and totems. Every one of them an agent of death – and every one priceless.

And there was one special box, iron encrusted with silver and salt, every inch etched with runes and wards, where John placed the most sacred and potentially ruinous items of all.

_– John, I know you ain’t the sharing type, but you need to tell me what the hell you’re putting in this box_

_none of your business, Singer. Now can you make the damned thing or not? –_

~<O>~

Anyone who knew John Winchester the hunter would tell you that he was a closed book. When he was still grieving and lost and way out of his depth with two little boys, everyone cut him some slack: he was scared and dissociative, so numb and raw that it was a surprise he could function at all. As the years passed, people began to think perhaps he was just naturally a cold fish, battle-hardened and unwilling to trust as he toted his sons from state to state. By the time Dean and Sam were into their teens, one boy world-weary and close to flunking out of school while he still followed after his daddy like a puppy, and the other sullen and withdrawn, lighting up only for his brother, anyone who encountered John just thought that he was a fucking asshole.

John wouldn’t have disagreed. Even his closest ‘friends’ – Bobby and Jim and Caleb – weren’t sure that he’d put his own sons first if it came to a choice between them and catching the demon he’d been chasing with all the frozen fire of obsession. Dean and Sam sure as hell weren’t certain either.

And that was how it needed to be.

Long before he knew what he was pursuing, John realized that he couldn’t afford for it to think it had leverage over him. Not the thing that had killed his wife and sent his life up in smoke, and not any other supernatural beast either. He couldn’t hide the fact that he had two boys – but he _could_ make it obvious that they weren’t his priority. That they were really more of a burden than anything else.

_– Dean was bleeding badly, deep gashes down his side, and the half-defeated shifter – torn up from the two bullets Dean punched into him – stared incredulously between the unconscious kid and John nonchalantly spinning his knife_

_if you don’t get him to a hospital, he’s gonna bleed out_

_it can wait; he’ll be fine_

_and you call me a monster, you heartless son of a bitch_

_nah, I call you dead meat –_

~<O>~

One day, not so long after Dean Winchester perpetrated family tradition and sold his soul to a demon, he and Sam visited John’s storage locker outside of Buffalo. They found an old shotgun and a small football trophy, and while it warmed them somewhere that they hadn’t known was cold and empty, they didn’t really understand what it meant.

If they’d ever found or figured out how to open the special box, they’d have been more confused than ever. Expecting some object of unnameable dread or untold value, they wouldn’t have known what to do with two sets of baby teeth, a patchy photo album of boys sleeping and playing obliviously, a set of report cards full of As and some crayon drawings of the Impala. They would have found other things too – not as many as there should have been, but enough to tell a sad and broken story.

What they’d have wondered most was why the hell their father felt the need to hide those things away.

But what John knew, instinctively and viscerally, was that the monsters he hunted in the dark – and that hunted him right back – might have considered those kinds of things beyond priceless, because they told a story of John Winchester that no living person had ever heard.

Sam was John’s pride – smart and brave and empathetic, for those who deserved it – and Dean was his joy: his eldest, with his practical mind and sure, competent hands – and the sweet, selfless nature that probably saved John from putting a gun in his mouth in those early years.

He knew that he couldn’t love them as he should while bringing them up as hunters, so he made his choices – and his mistakes, many of which he regretted bitterly, although that was strictly between him and the bottle.

Sam and Dean’s distance and their pain grieved him, but he kept them safe, even if he couldn’t keep _them_.

Until the day he didn’t.

They say the truth will out. And from the second that Azazel had been inside John and seen all those secrets lurking in his heart, history was doomed to repeat itself. John made the deal, just like Mary had done over thirty years previously, and just like Dean would barely a year later.

Because that’s how it is when evil bastards realize that you have something precious. Something that you’ll do anything to keep safe.

 

THE END


End file.
